Website: xkcd.com/

This webcomic is venerated by software engineers as of 2020.

Being able to quote the right one at the right time is considered a fundamental shibboleth of the profession.

And with reason.

Licensed under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC, amazing!!!

2021-12: www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/best-spaghetti-bolognese-recipe

One of the most powerful chess engine as of 2023: computer chess competition.

CLI program implementing Universal Chess Interface: www.reddit.com/r/ComputerChess/comments/b6rdez/commandline_options_for_stockfish/

How to actually play against it: chess.stackexchange.com/questions/4353/how-to-install-stockfish-on-ubuntu So hard!

On Ubuntu 22.10:just works with GNU go.

"Game" is a bit of a stretch as there are no player choices at all.

A more precise word would be simulation.

More precise, this "game" is exactly an absorbing Markov chain.

Since Snakes and Ladders is nothing but a Absorbing Markov chain, the results are exactly the same as for that general problem.

www.jstor.org/stable/3619261: How Long Is a Game of Snakes and Ladders? by Althoen, King and Schilling (1993), paywalled.

Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.

It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!

However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".

Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.

It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.

Here are some cool decks:

If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.

Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.

In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.

ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.

The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:

Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.

Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.

The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:

Very good channel that gives some idea of the behind the scenes of working with card stores and secondary market trading.

Such lessons can have applicability in business and investment outside of the Magic The Gathering context as well. Yet another example that usefulness can come out of uselessness.

Open source MtG engine implementation written in Java.

Seems to have an option to download art from internet as well.

Ciro Santilli wonders how legal it is. They very explicitly do not mention the words Magic: The Gathering anywhere.

Their UI does a good job at being self explanatory. Space is the shortcut to skip phases.

No online play.

TODO it appears to parse card functionality out of the human readable text! That's genius, as it helps automatically get new cards working, and squirt around legal issues.

Ciro Santilli used to play video games when he was young. But after he reached 18 he got bored of them.

The problem is that no matter how you look at, the how to become famous in the real world game is just always more interesting and fulfilling.

Therefore adult Ciro enjoys only the following types of video game content in video form, so that other people waste their lives playing the games while you only see the highlights:

The aspect Ciro enjoys about non-PvP games is atmosphere. Not as conveyed by useless story telling, but as conveyed by music and graphics, and the context deep idea. Legend of Zelda and Metroid come to mind.

And too many games commit the sins of dependency of dexterity, no save states, how do I skip this boring part, or jump straight to the beautiful one?

Another important point is; the perfect video game is an infinitely hard one.

It also doesn't help if you are already typing on a computer all day long on your job. Hands get tired. Eyes have an infinite capacity to consume useless YouTube videos however. Medically proved.

As a result, Ciro just watches videos about video games. Notably games he played when he was a teenager and already understand the rules for.

And things got even worse as after Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, and he started to feel bad about playing any game that is not open source.

This is true. The level of competition in university entry exams in Asia in insane in the early 21st century compared to the West.

This is actually both good and bad. Good because it selects some very good exam passers. And bad because it selects some very good exam passers.

This is a really good project. So fun to play around with. Low level IO part only like drawing to screen and handling keyboard inputs.

Ciro Santilli has: